Went to the NVTC Fall Fusion Fest last night at Ferari of Greater Washington. A thoroughly enjoyable networking event, though sometimes conversation wandered a bit. Hmm, Ferrari, Lambroghini or Maserati. Tough choices.

Business is good this week. Very zapped today, but need to rev it up as I have many afternoon appointments, including a board meeting to wrap up my sixth month of business. Making payroll is tough this month, but there’s enough contracts/biz to make November look good, and the pipe looks great.

Definitely need to focus on bringing these deals to fruition. And that means a heavy of weekend of work. Life as an entrepreneur. We are growing :)

GL

It was a gorgeous weekend in Washington. The leaves have really begun to turn, the weather was in the sixties, and the air had that first little nip of winter in it. It’s really one of my favorite seasons, and I can’t wait for next weekend when we will likely see peak foliage. According to Weather.com, we are already experiencing the early part of peak foliage.

Of course, with the turning leaves comes an instinctual sense of urgency. Winter is coming, and there’s a rush to get going. And business is no different. Why? Well, at least in this town things really come to a grinding halt after Thanksgiving.

Yeah, you might get a deal done if you’re lucky, but really if it’s not well on its way to be being done, you are looking at slowness until January/February, when things start to move again. So really, now is the time to close deals before the end of the year. There’s really 30 days left in the new business cycle for 2006.

Complicating things this year is the election. In my opinion, this is particularly true for the B2G marketplace. I think a lot of vendors are waiting to see what happens before allocating 2007 dollars. If the Democrats ride the tide all the way in and take both the House and the Senate, you’re probably looking at a different spending environment with a dramatic shift away from defense spending. Bush won’t pull the troops, but the Democrats won’t enable him anymore.

That’s why it’s good to have a balanced business with monies in multiple verticals. You can weather changes in the landscape.

Anyway, in that vein I organized my first sales pipe in 4+ months. With #1 on board, I can back to business as usual, and that’s a good thing. Focusing on new business wins is essential for a start-up (or any business for that matter). The good news is there’s a nice handful of opportunities to work on.

Another key business focus is visualizing positive outcomes. Dating all the way back from Earl Nightingale through to today’s Jeffrey Gitomer, sales coaches will tell you to focus on positive outcomes, such as winning. By visualizing the success, you attain your goals. Conversely, by visualizing failure, you achieve negative results.

I am really trying to be conscious of when my head starts to turn south right now, and immediately practice visioning positive outcomes. I’ve been listening to Denis Waitley’s Psychology of Winning to help get me there. And when I think about it, we’ve really had some great client successes over the past 5 weeks. It’s only natural that wins would follow.

OK, Monday’s quotes:

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.�
-Frank Lloyd Wright

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.�
-Benjamin Disraeli

OK, as promised, a part II blog entry. A lot of this is part of my presentation at the Northern Virginia Technology Council tomorrow morning.

Seeing as most companies cannot meet the successful news release requirements outlined in Sunday’s entry, they need to get out of the old news release box and embrace newer methods. Generating press coverage and word of mouth requires marketers to do more than issue news releases; they need to strive to achieve the Five Musts of Generating Buzz:

1. Companies must Get Out of Themselves and pay attention to their target audience’s interests to succeed.
2. Companies must build value for these target audiences and disseminate the information in ways that are viral.
3. The value that companies build needs to be related to their product: Starbucks = coffee, but buzz = relaxing, hip ambience while you have coffee.
4. Companies must inspire their target audiences to believe in the company, to talk about the company, to serve as its advocates.
5. Companies must commit to regular, consistent communications. A flash in the pan does nothing to help the company long term.

If you approach tactical public relations and word of mouth marketing with the Five Musts in mind, success is yours to have. There are many ways to generate this buzz, and we suggest that clients use a complex blend of vehicles to achieve corporate communications objectives. Here’s a list of some methods:

1. Traditional media relations, but focused on larger trends
2. Guerilla media relations: Exclusives, by-lines, letters to the editor
3. Internet PR
4. Blogosphere buzz
5. Speaking opportunities
6. Free content of interest (white papers, videos, podcasts)
7. Industry advocate program
8. Quality email newsletters, not corporate propaganda
9. Awards

I’d love to tell you how to best deploy these vehicles, but I can’t give away the entire house, now can I? Truly, the map has been laid out, and most competent PR/communications execs and firms should be able to rise to the occasion.

Business is good. With my new employee on board, I am so used to working 14 hours a day that the free time has driven me a little batty. That’s kind of sad that Only Working 10 hours would have this affect on me, a sign of how taxed I really was, but I knew what I was signing up for when I started this. So I am trying to get back to working out, and focusing on new business.

Hit a nice interview with the Washington Post, and we are getting ready to kick off the rock star publicity project this Friday. Woo hoo! The bad news is the jewelry store fell through. C’est la vie.

“All our servers got swamped – that was one big snow ball… many thanks for getting it started.â€?

The result of a blogging campaign last week, creating one happy customer. Had another favorable customer result last week, the successful win of a prestigious executive award. This is the stuff that makes it all worthwhile. Very enjoyable.

Yes, once you push that snow ball down the slope, you never know where it’s going to end up. Sometimes it fizzles out, sometimes it creates an avalanche. If it’s hot news, a value-added item of interest to the blogging community, you can guess where it’s going.

It’s interesting to see this kind of measurable response. Most advertising campaigns could never overload a server bay like that, not unless they are Super Bowl caliber or generate social interest. Neither could most news releases, though a very well placed story does sometimes have that same affect.

Speaking of news releases, my thinking of this promotional form of late is not very positive. Just to qualify, my comments apply to business promotion, not politics or advocacy. In my experience, increasingly over the past five years the news release has become a weaker and weaker form of promotion. I’m not the only one, see Sally Hodge’s article on news releases. This is particularly true when client x has a story that misses “home run� qualities.

Here are news stories that may work in a traditional way, i.e. issue the release, then call the media or even better have the media call you:

• Significant deal valuation (>$20 million)
• Acquisition of a company
• Earnings announcements or significant hire/layoff announcements (in the same vein, new offices)
• Recognized national leader involved (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, just choose the titans of your business)
• Hiring of nationally recognized individual (we’re talking serious stature, must be recognized by national or top tier trade media in previous life)
• New CEO of an organization that’s frequently in the news
• Crisis scenarios where the media is already focused on you

It seems like a significant list, but ask any CMO who wants ink, and they will nod at the list and struggle to meet its requirements. Achieving this type of news is hard for any company that’s not an established leader in some form. But they will still issue releases that do not fully meet this list’s requirements. And they get fair to middlin’ coverage at best.

Why is that? Well because in the media’s eyes it’s not news. News is something that’s new, and as media are dedicated to business trends or events of significance they use filters to tune out the increasingly larger number of releases thrown at them. Thus the diminished value of news releases.

So the question becomes how does a company garner increased coverage and establish leadership. How does a company build buzz so it becomes well known and their news releases are suddenly important? This will be the next blog entry’s focus (Wednesday a.m.).

A small request: If others are going to use this or other blog material in their own work, please cite me. This is the ethical to do.

Things officially get better today (Monday) with the start of LComm full-timer number two, my director of Internet Marketing. Glad you are on board, buddy. With my CD and another fellow on the team, we now have 2 and some change. This marks a serious milestone. You don’t know how nice it is to move forward with a partner, the one man army thing weighs on you.

Monday’s quotes:

“Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.â€?
-Cervantes

“For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.�
-Gloria Berger

“It’s better to be a company than to work for a company.â€?
-Jim Coudal

Got a wink from Potomac Flacks. PF author Adam Kovacevich and team mate Jennifer Horowitz are some of the good folks working over at Dittus, a high quality PR firm. So if you must use a larger, more established firm than mine (which you really don’t, but that’s OK, I understand), check them out.

Speaking of blogs, how about the Greater Washington Board of Trade’s expert approach to pulp fiction readers’ hacking of their advertisement (see 10/4 entry) showing Washington as an educated community. Result, positive NY Times and Washington Post coverage.

Note these bloggers call themselves smart… hmmm. Let me see, trust someone reading Plato or someone reading trashy romance books that proclaims self intelligence (Geoff quickly hides his sci-fi books, replacing them with Philip Roth masterpieces). These bloggers came out looking foolish and BoT looked brilliant in my opinion.. with NY Times and Washington Post coverage furthering the organization’s awareness.

Personally, I think the Board of Trade is a great organization. It was the first organization I joined when I started this company. Director of Marketing Alan Smith, a fellow blogger and someone that I’ve worked with, handled this like a champ.

Further, I am happy to see someone taking a proactive approach to negative blogging publicity. The facts are the facts, and as a business owner considering relocation to another city you want an educated workforce. Anyone with a brain in their head can see this. It’s called advertising, boys and girls. And BTW, I thought DC had the highest percentage of post graduate degrees in the country. Maybe not, Socrates. Better hide your business and philosophy books, you’ll get attacked on the metro by romance readers.

Biz is going well. Kind of a strange loll, a quiet before the storm. Lot’s of work, but it’s all on the client side right now awaiting approvals/feedback. I may bolt this afternoon for some short term fun because I see what’s coming at me this week and next, and know it’s not going to be pretty. My first full-time employee starts next week, plus two part time 1099ers right now. The bandwidth is ready, the game is on.